Reviewed by Rick Henry

"Let's drink to the fact that we're the products of each other's imagination." And with that, Ayami, the central character of Bae Suah's Untold Night and Day, and a character described only as "the director" drain their cups as we hold on to stave off disintegration.

So much of what begins to develop in Bae Suah's latest novel is undone, slipping away in one paragraph only to redevelop in the next, one page after another. This suggests a characterization of or metaphor for Untold Night and Day, but also for Suah's work more generally: it is like the ocean's waves washing up on a beach, withdrawing, washing back up, never the same but always there, occasionally bringing something up, certainly wiping the sand clean to make room for fresh tracks, new markings. Each of her books or stories might be another coastline, another point of contact between ocean and land, where waves caress and expose.

Suah, celebrated by most as an "un-Korean writer," has had her latest novel translated into English by Deborah Smith. Untold Night and Day is a novel that embraces the imagination, much like her previous works, North Station and A Greater Music; the stories in Recitation; the novella Milena, Milena, Ecstatic; and others. What distinguishes Untold Night and Day, however, are the specifics—those images, events, and sequences that develop and slip away only to reform and redevelop. All those coastlines. Those waves on the edge of disintegration.

Is it a novel? Perhaps it's less a novel than the writer's engagement with Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl. But Suah's book is so much richer in its accumulation of images than Hedayat's opium disease, agony, and pain, and so much more delicate in its attempts to hold and to comfort. The Blind Owl appears throughout Untold Day and Night in a variety of contexts, but only as a suggestion.

But as Andrea Plate asks in Asian Media International, "Is it even a novel? Untold Night and Day is more like a prose poem—150 pages of fantastical phatasmagoric images." Plate goes on to identify a number fields commentators have identified where Suah plays, fields that include surrealism, Dada, shamanism, the Lynchian, and abstract expressionism. All are profitable ways into her work, opening up different metaphors. The struggle with the question of genre—is it a novel or a prose poem or a narrative?—arises because answering it might give us some direction as to how to process the book, and in so doing, what to ignore. The cover of the Overlook edition states the book is "a novel." Two of the five blurbs on the back call it a "novel." One imagines these classifications mean the book contains something along the lines of an extended prose narrative involving characters with motivations, as well as a plot, conflict, and resolution. But Untold Night and Day is less about those things than it is about movement and timelessness.

From the field of options Andrea Plate gives us, we might invoke abstract expressionism with a host of linguistic phrases, images, and symbolic gestures thrown against a canvas consisting of several characters, settings, and events. Those gestures resonate more by associative principles than by anything driven by cause and effect, or by conflict and resolution. Extending this metaphor, the book would be four "paintings," four canvases consisting of Ayami, a former actress who has had only one role (in a four-minute performance film set in a Burger King where she was required to use three words in an improvised conversation) and who now works in an audio theatre and appears to have as a good friend its director, who is taking German lessons from a language coach named Yeoni (or so Yeoni appears in the first part), and who serves as a Korean host for a German writer in the country who is looking for background information for the detective novel he's working on. One senses how such things expand. Yeoni, who is the teacher, is also allegedly Ayami as a young child, and so on. The director of the audio theatre. A poet. A writer. In addition to these canvases are the settings, including the audio theatre, a "blackout restaurant" (where one eats in the dark), a room, and a television studio.

So much lies in Suah's individual descriptions, for these are her colors, the textures, the luminosity, the brush strokes as brush strokes. Here are but two examples from one page opened at random. As examples, these are unremarkable precisely because everything about their repetition is nested in wildly different contexts that share so much in terms of topic, setting, and imagery. The first example involves a simple stretch of words and phrases. In the first part, a man and a woman are in the audio theatre staffed by Ayami. They have stumbled across the theatre and have entered it for the first time. Suah describes the woman: "Her skirt fluttered like an old dishcloth in the alley's still air, exposing a pair of skinny calves corded with stringy muscle, pathetically small feet, and shoes that gleamed like new yet looked like cast-offs."

Then, in the third part, Ayami and a writer named Wolfi find themselves in a television studio that resembles a theatre. The (same?) woman is there, and the same description appears: "The short woman's scrawny calves corded with stringy muscle, her pathetically small feet, her shoes that gleam like new yet look like cast-offs, are exposed in vivid detail by the camera." Most of the description is the same, but it shifts, even within the boundaries of a sentence. We've lost the skirt and gained a camera. In the original context, Ayami speculates that the man and woman could be her parents. In part three, the woman suddenly (and randomly?) brings Ayami on stage to be in a television show entitled Family Reunion, where she asserts Ayami's life history in something resembling an afternoon talk show. The performance spins out a "properly" reconstructed "story" of Ayami's life and family, the death of her parents, her abduction by a pharmacist (who later had a nail driven into his head), her adoption, and so on. We learn that Ayami's given name was Yeoni and it was changed with her adoption. It is impossible in any representation here to capture how such repetitions resonate throughout the novel, and it is easy to lose these repetitions in their contexts and beyond to their larger ambiguities. The precision of Suah's repetition, however, is an invitation to look at how bodies are described throughout the novel, or here how the flutter and camera are contrasted, or Suah's use of such a phrase as one would use a proper name.

Three paragraphs after the initial appearance of this sentence, a new section begins, ostensibly about a week-long vacation Ayami spent in the city. The vacation has happened within the previous two years, but time hardly matters other than being something to be washed away (Family Reunion struggles to bring it back). What follows is a three-page tumble through a description of the city during a heatwave: "the city was like an animal being slowly smothered beneath a heap of steaming earth." A "he" (probably the writer named Wolfi identified in the third part of the novel) and Ayami appear, as do mentions of a fridge-chilled beer, a cucumber, and a radio that comes on at random moments—all of which are minor details dropped into the extended and luxurious description of the heatwave. The description ends. The first part moves on to a conversation with the director of the audio theatre and German lessons with a woman named Yeoni. The first half of the third part picks up another heatwave, with beer and cucumber and radio, but here the objects are fleshed out on a different canvas in conversation and in association with other descriptions, images, sequences. The canvas here is Ayami and Wolfi.

The richer the descriptions, the more associations with other images, imaginations, and scenes become available. Rather than cement an identity with an accumulation of details special to it, the details appear through time and space, attached to people and their experiences, thoughts, and feelings. The book opens with Ayami, sitting alone in the audio theatre that she manages, with a guest book in hand. It is an open invitation to whoever or whatever enters, readers included.

Probably the best way into Untold Night and Day can be found in the repetitive gestures of the book's final paragraph. A short while after they have toasted the imagination, the director has vomited on Ayami:

Ayami cradled the director's head, resting it quietly on her lap. Even when he had finished vomiting, she gently stroked his bloodied crown, from where the nail's thick head protruded. Ayami stroked him like that for a long time, as though the repetitive gesture might conjure a shamanic power—the only way of keeping together, in the same place and time, two human beings in the process of disintegrating.